Dan Rather report highlights voting machine weaknesses
Voices of Central Pennsylvania
Allegations by local election integrity activists were boosted by a dramatic report on the problems with touchscreen voting machines by respected journalist Dan Rather that aired on HD.Net, a national high definition television network, in August.
Among the problems uncovered by Rather was “drifting,” which causes a vote to appear somewhere other than where the voter touched the screen. In Centre County, election workers witnessed this problem with voting machines in Bellefonte.
“This individual punched one name and it showed up as the person above three times,” said pollwatcher Joanne Tosti-Vasey of one voter in the last election. “Both the judge and one of the clerks went over and observed this guy having the wrong vote occur three times in a row.”
Other allegations came from around the county.
“Even last week, at a picnic, someone approached me with a complaint about how much trouble they had in the May primary when the screen kept selecting a candidate other than the one they touched,” said activist Mary Vollero in a recent interview with Voices. “She had to try repeatedly to correct her vote.”
According to a Centre County election official, drifting was the only kind of problem reported across the county in the recent primary and it was limited.
“I think we had one precinct that has a drift issue on the screen … on occasion it drifts a little bit. Other than that I don’t believe we had any types of complaints,” said Wanda Hockenberry, assistant director of the elections and voter registration office. “We recalibrate them all before they go back out. They are done within a couple of weeks before they go out.”
The machines are manufactured by ES&S, which bills itself as the country’s largest electronic voting machine manufacturer. The company claims 67 million voters used 97,000 iVotronics machines in last November’s election. Every one of them requires calibration and testing before each use.
But one former manufacturer of voter-verified-ballot voting machines, Dennis Vadura of Acupoll, told Voices that ongoing calibration of such machines should not only be unnecessary, but actually invites problems.
“Any time you have thousands of machines you have to go recalibrate every time you have an election, some are going to get skipped, some are going to be bad,” explained Vadura, founder of Acupoll, referring to the machines manufactured by ES&S. “The point is, you shouldn’t rely on the end-user to have to do something to every single machine in order to have that machine run correctly for an election. Invariably human error comes into play. The fact that you’re doing it means there’s something else going on that’s causing it to be out of alignment, and there’s no guarantee it won’t be out of alignment by the time you get it to the polling place.”
The solution according to Vadura? “Eliminate as many of those interactions as you can. You can do all of that anyway and still run into trouble if your hardware doesn’t work.” He said his machines never needed calibrating after the first time.
Rather’s report pointed to the “pillowing” caused by faulty touchscreens, manufactured in Minnesota but shipped to the Philippines to a factory where workers make between $2.15 and $2.50 per day and work in 100-degree heat. Workers who reported problems with the quality were told to make the machines good “enough” and ship them out, according to the report. Quantity was more important than quality, according to workers, one of whom said the quality control test consisted of shaking the Ivotronic and listening for loose parts.